I have got to start staying on top of this again. Even starting on Saturday, I spent a big whack of my weekend reading blogs. Some really good stuff, though; part of my problem this week was looking through related pages and the like, it probably increased my reading load by half.

I have a dilemma. I want to write, and to work on Echelon… but there is so much good material out there that I don’t want to miss anything.

Kickstarter Projects

Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea (AS&SH) is a forthcoming role-playing game by North Wind Adventures . It is played with paper, pencil, dice, and imagination. Participants include one referee and one or more players. The referee prepares and presents the adventure material, and the players create player characters, such as the principal classes of fighter, magician, cleric, and thief; or a subclass, such as barbarian, berserker, cataphract, illusionist, necromancer, pyromancer, druid, shaman, assassin, legerdemainist, scout, and more!

The heroes of an AS&SH game delve dungeons filled with horrifying monsters, lethal traps, and bewildering puzzles; they explore savage wilderness frontiers and hostile borderlands; they probe ancient ruins and investigate cursed tombs; they match steel against sorcery, and sorcery against steel; and they plunder for gold, gems, and magical treasure.

Hyperborea is the default campaign setting for AS&SH. This “flat earth” realm is overlooked by a bloated, dying sun, and hemmed in by the mystical boreas (or “North Wind”). Hyperborea is in a perpetual state of decay, populated by disharmonious men, hostile monsters, and weird, alien beings.

The setting is inspired by the fantastic literature of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith. Other inspirational authors include Edgar Rice Burroughs, Fritz Leiber, Abraham Merritt, Michael Moorcock, and Jack Vance. AS&SH rules and conventions are inspired by the original 1974 fantasy wargame and miniatures campaign rules as conceived by E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.

Hyperborea is an adaptable campaign setting. It can be used independently or in conjunction with other settings, published or home-brewed; indeed, Hyperborea might be just beyond the North Wind of any campaign setting.

I’ve been waffling about this one, but it closes January 15, a few days after my birthday. I think maybe I’ll back this one as a birthday present to myself.

The Crown and the Dragon is an independently produced feature-length fantasy/adventure in the classic tradition – packed with action, romance, and a giant mythical beast bent on destruction. The film has already been shot, and we’re looking for additional funding to finish post-production, and make our dragon effects more spectacular than ever. Watch our teaser trailer to see actual footage from the film.

The story follows Elenn, an arrogant young noblewoman from the occupied land of Deira – a muddy backwater of the Vitalion Empire cursed by a particularly vicious dragon. Elenn accompanies her aunt on a mission to bring a relic to the secret coronation of the king of their people. When her aunt is murdered on the road by Vitalion soldiers, Elenn hires a smuggler and criminal, Aedin, to escort her across the dangerous country so she can take her aunt’s place at the coronation. But when Corvus, a rogue magister of the empire, employs a dark magic (Undead Assassins) to retrieve the ancient relic for his own evil designs, Elenn must find the humility and strength within herself to fulfill her aunt’s calling to free her people, and become a Paladin – the long foretold dragonslayer.

If the description’s not good enough, they’ve made the screenplay available for download, and the trailer below looks well done. I’m thinking about this one, the Kickstarter closes December 27.

Age of Ravens

The second half of this post doesn’t mean much to me (I know nothing about Night’s Black Angels), but the first part is something I’ve considered a time or two myself, and I know GreyKnight has taken a run at an integratedcollaborative design system .

Adapting Microscope by Ben Robbins for use in defining places instead of events makes way too much sense to be ignored.

Between Are The Doors

Fictivite provides some very high-level (or at least, sparsely detailed) information about domains. This reminds me very much of the holdings in Birthright, but it looks like it may be a simpler model. I’ll want to watch this topic, I may have use for it.

Dreams of Mythic Fantasy

James provides a link to an evidently defunct blog (Kellri , last post was in 2009) that has what appear to be some very good old school references. This particular post talks mostly about a document regarding encounters, and that it led to James writing about the halfling god of plunder means I’ll be taking a closer look at it later.

Given that I run into many of the same questions with project management and software design, you’d think I would have taken similar steps in building Echelon (I’ve considered many of these questions, though perhaps not documented them).

TODO: review this article and perhaps complete the steps described and answer the questions.

For anything of any particular size (say, more than fifteen or twenty pages), I look for:

Bookmarks (so I can navigate the document at the structure level)

Hyperlinked Table of Contents is nice to have (do include the Table of Contents if the document warrants it, I’m likely to print the document out if I really want to examine it, but hyperlinking isn’t as critical if it is properly bookmarked).

Hyperlinked Index

Internal hyperlinks can be nice to have if the document is large enough and there are enough references between things, but since I expect larger documents to still be usable in hard copy I would rather not have a document that depends on them.